


something left behind

by sevenfoxes



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: F/M, Mother-Daughter Relationships, Unplanned Pregnancy, generations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-01
Updated: 2017-08-01
Packaged: 2018-12-09 23:13:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11679093
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sevenfoxes/pseuds/sevenfoxes
Summary: It is Etta that notices it first.  Her mouth curls into a small smile, but the rest of her face bears a mask of deep, deep sorrow.  “It’s nothing,” Etta tells her when Diana presses at her, the lie deep but harmless.  It had been the same sorrow that Diana had felt inside herself realizing what she carried.They’d not even had a body to bury, ashes to scatter beyond those blown into the sky amongst the parts of the plane that sunk down to earth.  This, the life inside of her, is the last piece of Steve on this earth.--Steve leaves something behind.





	something left behind

**Author's Note:**

  * For [newthingsoveroldthings](https://archiveofourown.org/users/newthingsoveroldthings/gifts).



> Emilee asked for Diana/Steve fic for her birthday... I'm just deciding that this counts. It totally does.
> 
> A couple things:
> 
>   1. I am totally going with Eugene Brave Rock’s reveal that The Chief is Napi. LOVE. IT.
>   2. I’m running with the idea that since Diana is a god in the whole greek mythology vein, her kidlets would be demi-gods in their own right.
>   3. I did what I did with the male descendants for a reason. And it's not because they are less important than their female counterparts. It's more about what humans mean to Diana. 
> 

> 
> Yada yada, I hope this is okay, Emilee!

 

 

 

_Just like your Captain Trevor. Gone and left you nothing._

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It is not until Diana has settled into her cottage outside London that she begins to notice the changes in her body. The books on Themyscira had described the series of events that signaled the beginning of biological reproduction, but in all of Diana’s years, there had never been a single pregnancy on the island to speak of. It was a known academic fact rather than a reality for the Amazons.

With training, it was common to lose the monthly bleed. Many of her sisters had, and during the times Antiope pushed her the hardest, she had gone without it for many waxing and waning of the moons. But this is different, and when her abdomen begins to curve in a way it never has before, Diana knows what Steve has left behind inside of her.

It is Etta that notices it first. Her mouth curls into a small smile, but the rest of her face bears a mask of deep, deep sorrow. “It’s nothing,” Etta tells her when Diana presses at her, the lie deep but harmless. It had been the same sorrow that Diana had felt inside herself realizing what she carried.

They’d not even had a body to bury, ashes to scatter beyond those blown into the sky amongst the parts of the plane that sunk down to earth. This, the life inside of her, is the last piece of Steve on this earth.

Etta tries to arrange a visit to a physician, but Diana refuses. “They cannot tell me more about my body than I already know,” she explains, reminded of the simple, remedial medical volumes she’s read since leaving Themyscira - this is a world that knows not much of women. But there is a fear there, too. There is a reason she disappeared after the signing of the armistice, why Etta helps keep her hidden.

 _You're a weapon, lass,_ Charlie had told her quietly, smiling sadly when she’d argued profusely that she would never be a tool of war. _They'll turn you into a weapon before you know you are one. Then one day you'll wake up and you'll see the bodies of the people that only ever existed in the glass of a scope._

She understands the dream that Charlie is caught in. In the months since the war ended, Diana has seen the depths of human kindness, but also the sharp cunning of deceit. With a child, she cannot take such a gamble.

So she hides, only the few who knew of her exploits with Steve knowing of existence, of where she sets her head now.

Napi visits her late in the pregnancy, when the child has swollen Diana’s stomach in a way that makes her body feel foreign. He is her most constant companion now that Sameer has traveled east and Charlie has joined an expedition to South America.

He asks politely before he places his hand over her distended belly. The calm of his touch fills Diana with a profound joy, a peace she hasn’t known for a long, long while.

“She is powerful,” Napi tells her in Blackfoot. “She is like you.”

“She is good,” Diana replies. “Like her father.”

\--

_It is different with a man._

_Afterward, Steve threads her hair through his fingers, playing with the ends like they are the reeds she and her sisters used to pluck from the river that ran next to the fortress in Themyscira. She is swollen and wet between her thighs and without warning, Steve’s free hand dips down to run his fingers through his seed spread over the skin of her thighs._

_“I don’t think I’m going back,” Steve says quietly._

_“Back where?” Steve looks shocked when Diana speaks, like his words weren’t really for her. He clears his throat and resettles against, his thigh brushing up against her in a way that feels deeply pleasurable. She enjoys the weight of his body, the strength of it pressed up and on her._

_“Home. The States.” It’s so quiet in their reclaimed town, just the sound of the wind battering against the weakened window of the inn. It makes everything feel more intimate. “Not much to return to. Dad died a while back, and Mom died when I was a baby. Nothing but a lot of ghosts, really. I’d rather just stay on with British Intelligence or take a post in one of our field offices. I hear Rome is gorgeous… I think I’d like to go there someday”_

_Diana nods._

_“Will you go home? After, I mean. Seems like a little slice of paradise you’ve got there.” His strained tone does not go unnoticed by Diana; it sounds like he is worried about what her answer might be._

_“I cannot return home.”_

_Steve’s eyebrows shoot up. He pushes up on his elbow and looks down at her. “Why?”_

_“It is law in Themyscira: those who choose willingly to leave the island are not permitted to return to it. Queen Hippolyta has forbade it.”_

_Steve shakes his head. “She’s your mother…”_

_In the same ways that his world is foreign to her, hers will always be foreign to him. “But she is also my queen. She is a ruler, and as such, she must put duty before family. She could not allow me a trespass that others are not afforded. That is not what a just ruler does, and I would never ask it of her.”_

_For a moment, Steve looks truly horrified. When she reaches out to touch his face, he shifts again, this time over her body, his hips resting against hers._

_“So when you left with me, you knew…”_

_“That I could not return? Yes.”_

_He takes her jaw in his hand, his thumb brushing over her lips. He is so gentle and kind, the depth of it seemingly endless. The_ why _is written all over his face, but he does not say the word. They are both soldiers, and she knows now enough about Steve Trevor to understand that he believes in duty and sacrifice as much as she does. He more than anyone else would understand why she left with him, even though it meant leaving every earthly thing she knew besides herself behind._

_“You’ll just have to come with me to Rome then, won’t you?” he says with a smile that reaches all the way up to his eyes. She returns it before he leans down and kisses her._

\--

The child comes into the world quietly. One of Napi’s healers, Numees, helps deliver it, tending to Diana through the endless, back-breaking torment of a labour that lasts well over a day before a shrill wail pierces the room, then goes silent. 

When Numees hands her over, the babe blinks up at Diana with eyes she knows are inherited solely from her new daughter’s father. 

Blue. The same light blue as the waters of the home she'll never see again.

Diana has never known a love like this before. She spends endless hours enraptured, staring at her child who does little more than sleep and cry for food. Diana brings her to her breast and watches with fascination as she suckles hungrily before her eyes start to droop, her belly full with milk.

She and Steve created this life, this perfect little life, and when her daughter’s fingers wiggle in the air, grasping for something she cannot reach, the only mar on the perfection that Diana feels is that Steve is not here to witness it.

Somehow, Diana knows Steve would love being a father, knowing she gets to keep a part of him. It helps ease the ache.

Etta visits a few days after the birth with papers her contacts have helped steal: a blank birth certificate, already signed and sealed by the government. Only needing a name.

“I wish to name her after my aunt.” Diana remembers the fierceness of her mentor, the memory of her honour and goodness. “Antiope.”

Etta gives her a nervous smile, the kind that means she is thinking of something she will not speak. The world is still new and foreign to Diana, and Etta helps her navigate the strange seas that at times seem hostile to her. Even in the wake of Ares’s death, she can feel the low thrum of his angry power shifting in the earth. He alone was not the cause of the disease that blights mankind.

“Unique,” Etta says kindly after a moment. “A little bit of mouthful, though. Perhaps Annie?”

“Annie,” Diana says, looking down at her sleeping child.

\--

There had been no children on Themyscira, and Diana does not remember watching her own body grow, only that there was a time where her arms were not long enough to sneak into Menalippe’s satchel for the sweets she kept within. Watching a child grow is a new experience for her, and one she delights in.

For a while, Diana wants to see all of Steve in Annie: in the strange waddle of her first steps, to the gentle coo of her first words, to the stubborness that marks her early personality. But the truth is that Annie is her own unique little person; she may have Diana’s dark hair and her father’s light eyes, but watching her personality develop into something totally her own fills Diana with a deep, but beautiful melancholy.

Sameer and Charlie spoil her rotten, sending her gifts from the far flung places they explore, writing letters she reads aloud to Diana with a strong voice. Etta, now a stalwart part of the British security services, works hard to keep Annie hidden with a ruthlessness Diana appreciates. When she visits, she always sneaks sweets to Annie in her purse - lemon drops and butterscotch ripples that Annie hoards like treasure. 

Napi’s relationship with Annie is the most beautifully profound of all. For a loud and headstrong child, she will sit for hours in contemplative silence with Napi, something passing between them that is solely for them.

Diana shares the history of the Amazons with Annie as often as she talks about Steve, insistent that neither be a sore or hurtful memory of things lost, but rather a remembrance of the people who have made them strong.

“Tell me again,” Annie says one night, her head lolling on the pillow. This is her favourite bedtime story.

“You are from a great line of warriors,” Diana tells her daughter.

“Like grandmama,” Annie chimes in, reaching up to play with the ends of Diana’s hair the same way her father had once. Her eyes are heavy with sleep, but she’s trying valiantly to keep them open to hear the story. 

“Yes. Like your grandmother. And you, my sweet, you were named after the greatest of them all. When I was your age, she trained me how to protect myself, how to make the right choices, even if they are hard ones.”

Diana’s heart breaks at Annie’s next words. 

“Like father.”

It has been nearly eight years since Steve died, but the wound still feels fresh. “Yes. They both sacrificed to save others. They were both selfless and good.”

Annie’s sleepy smile makes Diana smile in echo. It is hard to be upset about what has transpired when she has something so cherished and safe in front of her, a reminder of the good things this world has given her despite the things it has stolen in return. “Tell me about him,” her sleepy voice asks, her hands too tired to lift enough to play with her hair.

Diana presses a kiss to her forehead.

“I lived in a beautiful land with a code, a simple way of life. I lived with strong women who were taught from birth to be honourable and good. Your father lived in this world, a world of grey, and yet he was more than that. He saw the grey and dark and chose an honourable path despite its difficulties. He was the best man I’ve ever met, even with his flaws, and he gave me you. He gave me you, so he’s not really gone. He gave this world you, too. And it will be better for it.”

Annie’s asleep before Diana finishes the words.

\--

Time brings knowledge that the end of the Great War was not the end of armed strife for this world. Soon, a new evil fills the spaces it left behind, this time of man's own making outside of influence, and the cloud of death it brings with it nearly suffocates Diana entirely.

Annie defies Diana’s wishes to remain out of harm’s way as she herself fights. It has been nearly twenty years since Diana last saw her mother, and it has taken a daughter of her own to see why her mother had guarded her so fiercely. It is one thing to know the importance of a battle, it is another to be willing to sacrifice your own child to it.

It paralyzes Diana, limits the distance she is willing to take from her daughter who marches into the battlefield with her, covertly as a war nurse.

Annie does not have Diana’s full strength, though enough of it that she has not been sick a day in her life, despite the small outbreaks of illness that have plagued the small village Diana has called home for the last nineteen years. She does not have the extent of Diana’s speed or raw physical power - enough that she can outpace any man, bend metal and lift weights no human should be able to - but the gods have graced her daughter with a different power. 

It is in Liezen, the air thick with the stench of blood and mud, that Diana first sees the gift Annie has been given.

“It’s okay,” Annie says, bent over the man she found on the hill, her voice calm and warm, reminicient of her father's. She touches her hand to the bare skin of the half-dead soldier who is weeping, crying for his mother as his guts spill from his body. He is so young - younger than even Annie, Diana thinks - and her heart breaks at his child-like cries. 

A serious mask of concentration falls over Annie’s face as she wraps her fingers around the man’s wrist and whispers, “You’ll be just fine.” 

Like a tap being turned, the tears stop flowing and a sudden peace fills the man’s features. By the time the medics make it to the man, half of his wounds have stitched themselves shut, and the soldier won’t let go of Annie’s hand, his fingers slotted through hers.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he says to her before the medics force his hand from hers. He’s crying again, but they are no longer tears of sorrow. “Bless you, _bless you_.”

Diana had been right all those years ago, Annie growing in her womb: she is good, like her father.

Annie meets her husband during the war, a French resistance fighter who earns a terrible scar over his eye and a gut wound that would have ended his life had Annie not stumbled on his safehouse. Etienne is exceedingly handsome, and devoted to Annie in such an all-consuming way that Diana knows the first time he shows up at her cottage door, his cap under his arm and a clutch of wildflowers in his hands asking for Annie, that her daughter is hers no longer.

Their twins are born a little over a year after they are married. It is apparent within a year that while Rose takes after her mother, Guillaume does not. While he does not carry the gifts of his sister and mother, Guillaume is the spitting image of his grandfather. He is blond with a strong jaw and a mischievous temperament, and the likeness only grows as he ages.

When Etienne learns of Annie’s secret, of the secret his own daughter will carry, the dedication he deploys to guarding them - of guarding Diana by extension - fills Diana’s heart. Her greatest wish was for her daughter to feel the love she once felt with Steve, however brief. To watch her daughter be cherished is a gift beyond compare.

In the end, they have four children - two boys and two girls - before a bad car accident takes Etienne’s life. Rose, riding alongside her father in the truck, is left unscathed even though the entire front of it caves in. Although Etienne knew no metal could pierce the skin of his daughter (one of the gifts Rose had been given, while Napi had confirmed that Etta had the power of dreamwalking), when rescuers peel open the truck, they find him wrapped around his daugher, protecting from the shard of it that went through him and bent off of her.

(Men can choose to be good. Sometimes Diana must remind herself of that in a world that seems to grow crueler by the day.)

With Etta Candy dead two years previous, there’s no reason for Diana to stay in London any longer; she moves to France to help raise her grandchildren.

\--

While the males of her line are born human, like their male ancestor, her daughter and her daughter’s daughters are born with gifts, with beautiful abilities than manifest as they grow. But they are not born with Diana’s immortality. She watches them age with a growing horror, the blush of youth fading into rough skin and failing bodies.

Soon, time comes to claim Annie, who dies in Diana’s arms at the age of ninety-three.

For Diana, it is a sorrow beyond compare. She has lost other kin to the world - to fighting, to disease, to time - but Annie is different. She’d been so much like her father, the part of him left behind that had made his absence melancholy instead of crushing. Steve has dozens of descendents now, men of honour and women of strength, but Annie had been _their child_.

It is the moment Diana begins to withdraw from the world, letters unanswered and phone calls missed. She stops visiting her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, leaving them to live a life undisturbed by her presence.

In truth, Diana is not sure of her purpose any longer. Once it had been to kill a god, to save a world. Then it had been to raise a child, a good child. Steve’s child. To protect the world that child lived in.

The child lives no longer.

It is only when Sarah comes to visit her in Paris, flying in with her husband and three children from New York, that Diana finally relents. Sarah is like her mother, Etta, the second of Annie’s two daughters. Etta’s line had all inherited gifts of the mind, rather than strength or control of elements like Rose’s had. Sarah, the most intuitive of all of Diana’s descendents, can read minds and emotions. In the wrong hands, Diana knows this gift could abused in the worst of ways, but Sarah’s goodness is a near palpable thing. Mostly, she uses it in her work as a child psychologist, working with children trapped in their own minds.

“You can choose not to fight,” Sarah tells her, drinking tea while her children play in the living room of her palatial flat. Diana has long since given up a simple lifestyle. “You’ve more than earned the right to rest.” Sarah slips her hand over Diana’s, the skin on it growing older while Diana’s remains unchanged forever. “But you can’t leave this world behind, Aunt Diana. There are too many of us who love you to do that.”

For the children too young to understand who Diana is to them, she is simply an aunt until they are old enough to keep the secret needed to protect their family. Even so, most of her great-grandchildren, like Sarah, still call her Aunt Diana.

“It’s more than that.” Despite all her efforts, the world is still the broken, troubled place it has always been.

Sarah smiles. “I know.”

Her great-great granddaughter Hanna is young, her powers still manifesting. Sarah is worried in the way any mother would be given her daughter has begun speaking to herself, to talk to people no one else can see or hear. Many of the children Diana has grown to love have had imaginary friends, secret confidants that helped them cope with learning the world, but Hanna’s friends have grown to scare Sarah, though she won’t tell Diana why.

It is one of their very few secrets until Hanna tells Diana a secret of her own.

“He said for me to tell you he’s loved watching them grow,” Hanna says one day with all the precociousness of a seven year old with lovely dimples and a disposition that reminds Diana of Etta Candy. She is playing with coloured blocks, carefully constructing a tower out of them, her tongue poking out of the side of her mouth. “He thinks they are beautiful, like you.” She repeats, “He wanted me to tell you.”

“Who?”

“Papa.” 

Diana thinks of her granddaughter’s husband, a wonderfully kind man who dotes on Sarah, even given he barely remembers she is his daughter most days thanks to the Alzheimer's. “Grandpa Sayeed?”

Hanna shakes her head with a mischievous smile inherited from a man who lived nearly a hundred years ago. 

“Papa Steve.”


End file.
